The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump

by Martin Amis

  I peaked at the age of forty. One legendary summer I performed on the court like a warrior poet, with ichor streaming through my veins, and a visionary gleam in my concentrated eyes—and carried my Wilson for five months without losing a set. At the end of that year I recorded what was perhaps my greatest victory, against Chris, one of the burlier and wittier first-teamers at Paddington Sports Club. It was just the one set, that day, and I had a plan: I moonballed him into a frenzy (while his piss-taking peers looked on). Chris stood there with his hands on his hips and his head down, waiting (and swearing) while the ball descended from the troposphere. When we shook hands at the net (7–5), Chris said: “Well played, Mart. You’re fucking useless, and if I don’t beat you six–love, six–love next time I’m giving up the game.” Next time he won 6–0, 6–1. Chris did not give up the game.

  But I did—by degrees. In my mid-forties I noticed that I was losing to my erstwhile equals; then I started losing to people I had never lost to; then I started losing to absolutely everyone. And each match, for me, became an increasingly effortful passion play about the aging process. You become slower, of course, and clumsier, and your pelvic saddle hurts a lot all the time, and you simply don’t want a second set, let alone a third. But the most terrible symptom of all is the retardation of your reflexes. The ball comes over the net like a strange surprise: you just stand there and watch until, with a senescent spasm, you bustle off to meet it. This tendency manifested itself elsewhere. One afternoon I was watching a tense football international with my sons, and halfway through the second half the elder said: “In the sixty-third minute, Paul Scholes scored for England. And in the sixty-fifth minute, Dad leapt to his feet.”

  About a year ago I came to the convenient conclusion that the day wasn’t long enough (and life wasn’t long enough) for tennis: changing, driving, parking, stretching, playing, losing, stretching, driving, showering, and changing—not to mention the hours spent at the hands of sadistic physiotherapists. Maybe, one day, I’ll start limping back onto the lined court. But for now I just miss it. Tennis: the most perfect combination of athleticism, artistry, power, style, and wit. A beautiful game, but one so remorselessly travestied by the passage of time.

  The Guardian 2009

  More Personal 2

  Deciding to Write Time’s Arrow

  “Why did you decide to write a novel about the Holocaust?” This challenge, which I still sometimes hear, can only be answered as follows: “But I never did.” Similarly, I never decided to write a novel about teenage sexuality, or Thatcher’s England, or millennial London, or, indeed, about the Gulag (which I nonetheless completed in 2006). With its hopelessly inapposite verb, and presumptuous preposition, the question reveals an understandable naïveté about the way that fictions are made. For the novel, as Norman Mailer put it, is “the spooky art.”

  Deciding to write a novel about something—as opposed to finding you are writing a novel around something—sounds to me like a good evocation of writer’s block. No matter what its length (vignette, novella, epic), a work of fiction begins with an inkling: a notion that is also a physical sensation. It is hard to improve on Nabokov, who variously described it as a “shiver” and a “throb.” The throb can come from anywhere, a newspaper report (very common), the remnants of a dream, a half-remembered quote. The crucial, the enabling fermentation lies in this: the shiver must connect to something already present in the subconscious.

  Time’s Arrow depended on a coincidence, or a confluence. In the mid-1980s I started spending the summers on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where I made friends with the distinguished “psychohistorian” Robert Jay Lifton. Bob was and is the author of a succession of books on the political horrors of the twentieth century: books on thought reform in China, on Hiroshima, on Vietnam. And in 1987 he gave me a copy of his latest (and perhaps most celebrated) work, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide.

  Here, Lifton’s historiographical mission is to establish Nazism as an essentially biomedical ideology. It is there in Mein Kampf: “Anyone who wants to cure this era, which is inwardly sick and rotten, must first of all summon up the courage to make clear the causes of this disease.” The Jew was the agent of “racial pollution” and “racial tuberculosis”: the “eternal bloodsucker,” “germ-carrier,” the “maggot in a rotting corpse.” Accordingly, the doctor must become a “biological soldier”; the healer must become a killer. In the camps, all the nonrandom murders were supervised by doctors (and so were the crematoria). As one of their number put it, “Out of respect for human life, I would remove a gangrenous appendix from a diseased body. The Jew is the gangrenous appendix in the body of mankind.”

  That year, too, I already had it in my head that I might attempt a short story about a life lived backward in time. This tenuous proposition appealed to me as a poetic possibility—but it seemed fatally frictionless. I could find no application for a life so lived. Which life? As I began The Nazi Doctors, I found myself thinking, most disconcertingly, This life. The life of a Nazi doctor. “Born” in New England, as an old man; “dying” in Austria, in the 1920s, as a baby boy…

  After more than a year of further reading, and of daily struggles with a sense of profanity and panic (by what entitlement could I address this sepulchral subject, and from such an apparently “playful” vantage?), I began to write. And at once I made an emboldening discovery: the arrow of time turns out to be the arrow of reason or logic, expectably enough; but it is also the arrow of morality. Set the cinema of life in reverse motion, and (for example) the city of Hiroshima is created in a single moment; violence is benign; killing becomes healing, healing killing; the hospital is a torture chamber, the death camp a font of life. Reverse the arrow of time, and the Nazi project becomes what Hitler said it was: the means to make Germany whole. Which still strikes me as some kind of measure of this terminal and diametrical atrocity: it asked for the arrow of time to point the other way.

  We often ask ourselves, Who was worse, the little mustache or the big mustache, Hitler or Stalin? Well, fifteen years later I wrote a novel about the Russian Holocaust, too (House of Meetings); and the latter, incidentally, was the more difficult to write, because it focused on the victims and not the perpetrators. But that is by the way. In our hierarchy of evil, we instinctively promote Hitler. And we are right.

  The Gulag—and this is not widely grasped—was first and foremost a system of state slavery. The goal, never achieved, was to make money. Still, this is a motive we can recognize. The German idea, with its “dreams of omnipotence and sadism” (Lifton), was utterly inhuman, or “counterhuman,” in Primo Levi’s judgment, like a counterclock world. The Nazis were on the intellectual level of the supermarket tabloid. It shouldn’t surprise us to learn that there was a government department, in Berlin, set up to prove that the Aryans were not descended from the apes; no, they came from the lost continent of Atlantis, in the heavens, where they were preserved in ice from the beginning of time.

  The Guardian 2010

  Marty and Nick Jr. Sail to America

  I paid my first visit to America in 1958, at the age of nine; and I liked it so much that I stayed for almost a year. Before we embarked on the Queen Elizabeth, I and my brother Philip (aged ten) took the wise precaution of changing our names. For me it was quite straightforward: I would be known, stateside, as Marty. Philip was more imaginative, adapting one of his middle names and coming up with Nick Jr.—while boldly ignoring the fact that there was no Nick Sr. My middle name, I later realized, would have been perfect just as it was: Louis (my parents were admirers of Louis Armstrong). Anyway, when the great liner approached the glittering immensity of New York, Nick Jr. and Marty were fully prepared.

  We came from Swansea in South Wales. This was a city of such ethnic homogeneity that I was already stealing cash and smoking the odd cigarette before I met—or even saw—a person with black skin. My baptism of fire came in 1956, when my father took me along to visit an academic from what was then
Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). On the way, as we rode the scarlet double-decker, he delivered a patient and, I thought, rather repetitive tutorial on what lay ahead of me. “He’s got a black face,” he said. “He’s black.” And so on. I entered the little apartment—and immediately burst into tears. Nor did I mince my words: “You’ve got a black face!” “Of course I have,” said the visiting professor, once he finished laughing. “I’m black!”

  My father, in 1958, was also a visiting professor—he had come to teach creative writing at Princeton. By the time we started school at Valley Road, Nick Jr. had made my mother buy him his first pair of long trousers; Marty turned out to be the only human being in the entire establishment who was wearing shorts (plus Clarks sandals and floppy gray socks). At Valley Road there were plenty of black pupils—though, as I recall, no black teachers; and at home I was soon on excellent terms with our cleaning lady, May, who drove over from Trenton two or three times a week in her sensational pink Cadillac.

  In fourth grade I made friends first with Connie, then Marshal, then Dickie. After a while I became enamored of a black boy—called Marty. Marty wore his name with some panache (whereas, in my case, Marty had reverted to Mart, just as Nick Jr. had reverted to Phil).

  One day, with Marty, I used the come-on line favored by British children:

  “Would you like to come to my house for tea?”

  “Mm. I prefer coffee.”

  “I meant high tea. With cakes and buns. You can have coffee.”

  “Nah. Your mother wouldn’t like me.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m black.”

  “…My mother won’t even notice you’re black.”

  So Marty came to tea, and it was, I thought, a complete success. Then I went to Marty’s. He lived in Princeton’s black neighborhood (which, I gather, is now mainly Hispanic). And as I ate the evening meal with Marty’s large family, and played basketball in the back alley with his brothers and his friends, I most certainly noticed I was white, and with a physical intensity that I will never forget. The only boy in the school wearing shorts: take that blushful isolation and multiply it by a thousand. This was my skin. And what I endured was a three-hour attack of self-consciousness so crushing that I feared I might faint dead away. And I later wondered: Was this how Marty felt at my house? Was this how Marty felt on Main Street?

  In 1967 my father took another teaching job in America—“at Vanderbilt University at Nashville, Tennessee,” according to his Memoirs, “an institution known, unironically I suppose to some, as the Athens of the South.” Princeton started admitting black students in the mid-1940s. Two decades later my father asked if there were any “coloured” students at Vanderbilt. “Certainly,” came the unsmiling reply. “He’s called Mr. Moore.” Nor did the senior common room, in the department of the humanities, provide any kind of counterweight to the “values” of the surrounding society—i.e., the raw prejudices of the hog wallow and the gutter. The culprit in the following anecdote was a novelist and a teacher of literature called Professor Walter Sullivan:

  Whenever I tell this story, as I frequently do, I give him a Dixie chawbacon accent to make him sound even more horrible, but in fact he talked ordinary American-English with a rather attractive Southern lilt. Anyway, his words were (verbatim),

  “I can’t find it in my heart to give a negro [pron. “nigra”] or a Jew an A.”

  The strong likelihood of hearing such unopposed—indeed, widely applauded—sentiments at each and every social gathering moved my father to write that he considered his period in Nashville to be “second only to my army service [1942–45] as the one in my life I would least soon relive.”

  All this happened a long time ago, and I can prove it. During that year in Princeton the Amis family—all six of us—went on a day trip to New York City. It was an episode of joy and wonder, and of such startling expense that we talked about it, incredulously, for weeks, for months, for years. What with the train tickets, the taxi fares and ferry rides, the lavish lunch, the lavish dinner, and the innumerable snacks and treats, the Amises succeeded in spending no less than one hundred dollars.

  When he got back to the UK in 1967 my father wrote a longish poem about Nashville, which ends: “But in the South, nothing now or ever. / For black and white, no future. / None. Not here.” His despair, it transpired, was premature. One of the most marked demographic trends in contemporary America is the exodus of black families from the northern states to the southern. Nevertheless, those of us who believe in civil equality are suddenly in need of reassurance. I refer of course to the case of Trayvon Martin. Leave aside, for now, that masterpiece of jurisprudence, “stand your ground” (which pits the word of a killer against that of his eternally wordless victim), and answer this question: Is it possible, in 2012, to confess to the pursuit and murder of an unarmed white seventeen-year-old, and then be released without charge? Ease my troubled mind, and tell me yes.

  The New York Times 2012

  You Ask the Questions 2

  Are you an Islamophobe?

  Alisdair Gray, Edinburgh

  No, of course not. What I am is an Islamismophobe. Or better say an anti-Islamist, because a “phobia” is an irrational fear, and there is nothing irrational about fearing people who say they want to kill you. The form that vigilante xenophobia is now taking—the harassment and worse of Muslim women in the street—disgusts me. It is mortifying to be part of a society in which any stratum feels under threat. On the other hand, no society on earth, no society imaginable, could frictionlessly absorb a day like July 7, 2005. Anti-Islamism is not like anti-Semitism. There is an empirical reason for it.

  More generally, the difficulty has to do with versions of national identity; and the American model is the one that we (and everyone else) should attempt to plagiarize. A Pakistani immigrant, in Boston, can say, “I am an American,” and all he is doing is stating the obvious. Can his equivalent, in Bradford, say the equivalent thing in the equivalent way? Britain needs to become what America has always been—an immigrant society. That, in any case, is our future.

  The phrase “horrorism,” which you invented to describe 9/11, is unintentionally hilarious. Have you got any more?

  Jonathan Brooks, by e-mail

  Yes, Jonathan, I’ve got another one for you (though I can hardly claim it as my own): fuck off. And incidentally “horrorism” is a word, not a phrase.

  I wasn’t describing “9/11.” I was describing suicide bombing, or suicide–mass murder. And the distinction between terrorism and horrorism is real enough.

  If for some reason you were about to cross Siberia by sleigh, you would be feeling “concern” or even “anxiety”; when you started out, and you heard the first howl of the wolves, your anxiety would be promoted to “fear”; as the pack drew closer and gave chase, your fear would become “terror.” “Horror” is reserved for when the wolves are actually there. Some acts of terrorism are merely terrible. Suicide–mass murder, the act of self-splattering in which the assailant’s blood and bones and organs become part of the political argument, is always horrific.

  Something like four-fifths of all suicide bombings in history have occurred post–September 11. Suicide bombing is new; and I have to say that I can’t think of any greater defilement of the human image.

  What do you think should be done about Israel and Iran’s looming nuclear standoff? Would you support an Israeli preemptive nuclear strike?

  Clive Marr, Cambridge

  Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, after that goons’ rodeo in Tehran (where Islamist scholars gathered to question the historicity of the Holocaust) and his recent electoral reverses, is probably on the wane; but even Rafsanjani, Iran’s most prominent (and corrupt) “pragmatist,” has said that a nuclear attack on Israel would obliterate the Jewish entity, whereas any retaliatory strike, however devastating, would be “absorbed” by Greater Islam.

  It is understandable that Israel should be far from enthusiastic about the emergence of a suicide bomb
that can be measured in megatons. The only way forward, I think, is diplomacy, and it has to be led by America, which, in turn, must recognize that the West’s two-tier nuclear position is a moral and philosophical nonstarter. The West must give some face (do they realize how crucial this is?), and start cutting arsenals with a view to the utopian goal: the zero option, worldwide.

  Can the war on terror be won?

  Amber Alwan, by e-mail

  When historians come to write about this era (I persistently imagine), they will begin by saying that, in the early stages, the West panicked and wildly overreacted; and they will go on by saying that the strategy for defeating or containing terrorism was slow to crystallize. That strategy hasn’t yet emerged, but we are slowly narrowing in on it. Remember the axiom: the deeper danger of terrorism lies not in what it inflicts but in what it provokes. September 11 could be sustained and survived; the ramifications of the Iraq War are still unknowable, and are already vast and multiform. Islamism has received a great boost from its rejection of reason and its embrace of death, both of which are hugely energizing, as Lenin and Hitler well understood.

  Islamism, jahadi-ism, now, its warriors obedient to a famous manual called The Management of Savagery, is simply too poisonous to survive for very long. What happened within Islam was not a civil war (between the moderates and the radicals); it was more like an October revolution (a revolution which is already starting to devour its children). We’ll never “win,” exactly. But the Age of Vanished Normalcy will gradually become a thing of the past.

  Have you made up with your old friend Christopher Hitchens after your spat over Stalin?

  Marlijn Evans, London

  We never needed to make up. We had an adult exchange of views, mostly in print, and that was that (or, more exactly, that goes on being that). My friendship with the Hitch has always been perfectly cloudless. It is a love whose month is ever May.